Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

The Cobbler Blu-ray Movie Review

Man of a Thousand Faces

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 12, 2015

The Cobbler stars Adam Sandler, but it isn't an Adam Sandler movie. Every so often, Sandler takes a break from the juvenile comedies that have been his bread and butter and turns himself over to a writer/director who wants something from him beyond the familiar persona that hasn't significantly changed since Sandler's days on Saturday Night Live. Paul Thomas Anderson made him an unlikely romantic lead in Punch-Drunk Love. Mike Binder made him a vessel of grief in Reign Over Me. In The Cobbler, Tom McCarthy tries to make Sandler . . . well, that's the problem.

McCarthy has always been willing to take risks. By his own account, he begins scripts with a simple idea and lets a story develop organically, without knowing in advance where it will lead him or where it may end. The results have often been striking in their originality. The Station Agent introduced the world to Peter Dinklage, now famous as Game of Thrones' Tyrion Lannister. The Visitor gave the first leading role (and an Oscar nomination) to Richard Jenkins, one of the finest supporting actors working today. Win Win provided Paul Giamatti an unusually complex character to which he could apply his talents for nuance.

But risk-taking also means accepting the possibility of failure, and The Cobbler doesn't work. It's a quirky fairy tale that, while never boring, lacks the larger dimension that gives fairy tales their resonance. The adventures of Sandler's character, a sad and lonely shoemaker who acquires magical powers, don't lead anywhere. As much as McCarthy and a talented cast labor to make The Cobbler's events feel enlightening and significant, they would almost be more suitable as a sinister episode of The Twilight Zone.

In a prologue set in 1903 on New York's Lower East Side, a group of Jewish shopkeepers plead (in subtitled Yiddish) with Pinchas Simkin (Donnie Keshawarz), the local cobbler, to do something about an oppressive landlord named Gergerman. When Pinchas responds that Gergerman isn't one of his customers, the group presents him with a pair of the villain's shoes. Later, Pinchas' young son, Herschel (Ethan Khusidman), finds his father working on the shoes at a peddle-powered stitching machine. Pinchas proceeds to tell Herschel the improbable tale of how the boy's grandfather acquired the machine.

In the present day, the current generation of Simkin is Max (Sandler), a morose individual with the air of someone whom life has disappointed. Max lives in Brooklyn with his aged mother (Lynn Cohen), whose mind is failing. Max's father, Abraham (Dustin Hoffman in flashbacks), abandoned them long ago under circumstances never fully explained. Ever since then, Max has been stuck running the same shoemaker's shop on the Lower East Side and looking after his mother. The closest thing he has to a friend is Jimmy (Steve Buscemi), the owner of the barbershop next door, who was a friend of Abraham's and is always sending pears to Mrs. Simkin.

Max's life takes a magical turn one day when his electric stitcher breaks down while he is rushing to meet a deadline for a gangsta customer, Leon Ludlow (Cliff "Method Man" Smith). Loathe to risk Ludlow's wrath, Max descends to the basement and uses the ancestral foot-powered stitcher to complete the job. When Ludlow doesn't show up at closing time, Max becomes intrigued by the flashy footwear, which is exactly his size at 10½, and tries on the shoes. Instantly, his outer appearance is transformed into that of Ludlow.

Once Max gets over the shock, he begins seeking out other shoes his size, using the magic stitcher and assuming different identities, including that of a massive transsexual named Marsha (Yul Vasquez), an overweight teen (Miles J. Harvey), an Indian man (Cliff Samara), a Chinese man (Stephen Lin) and a handsome European named Emiliano (Dan Stevens) with a gorgeous girlfriend (Kim Cloutier). But although Max's outer appearance may change, he remains the same person. He may be walking in another person's shoes, but it's still Max doing the walking.

Many of Max's adventures result from venturing too deeply into Ludlow's criminal world, which the sheltered tradesman is ill-equipped to handle. Among Ludlow's many illicit businesses is tenant removal for a slum landlord, Elaine Greenawalt (Ellen Barkin), who wants a building cleared so that it can be knocked down to allow development on land owned by Greenawalt in downtown Manhattan. At the same time, a protest is being organized by an activist, Carmen Herrara (Melonie Diaz), who has already visited Max's shop seeking to recruit local businesses in support of her cause. The focus of the protest is Mr. Solomon (Fritz Weaver), a holdout tenant in Mrs. Greenawalt's property, who simply will not move.

In a sequence that is equal parts charming and queasy, Max uses the stitcher on a pair of his father's old shoes, so that he can grant his mother's fondest wish: to have dinner with his father once again. Dustin Hoffman and Lynn Cohen play the scene beautifully, but it's hard to shake the realization that Mrs. Simkin is being romanced by her son, not her husband.

While all this is happening, Max's friend, Jimmy the barber, grows increasingly concerned. Just before your father left home, he tells Max, he, too, began disappearing during business hours for no apparent reason. Is this a case of like father, like son? As it turns out, there are interesting affinities between Max and his father, and it all goes back to the family history, of which we saw a small portion in the prologue. We're just getting back to it as the film ends. It's almost as if the entire film has been the setup for a different film that McCarthy hasn't yet made.

Maybe that other film would be about the vanishing tradesman in a rapidly changing economy (a subject barely addressed in The Cobbler). Or maybe it would be about the immeasurable value of small acts of kindness in daily life. Whatever the subject, it would need to break out of the confines of the idea that McCarthy has said was the inspiration for The Cobbler, which was his search for the origin of the phrase "to walk a mile in someone else's shoes". The Cobbler circles that idea relentlessly, and its stride is lively, but by the end all it has to show for the effort is sore feet.

The Cobbler Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Cobbler was shot by W. Mott Hupfel III (The Savages and The Notorious Bettie Page). Based on equipment glimpsed in the behind-the-scenes featurette, the film was shot digitally. Post-production was completed on a digital intermediate, from which Image Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced by a direct digital path.

As is common with digitally originated projects, the Blu-ray image is clean, detailed and sharp without noise or interference. Colors are naturalistic, with the exception of the prologue set in 1903, which has been given a dark brown tint to suggest old photographs (or, perhaps, faded memories). Black levels and contrast appear to be accurate.

Image has mastered The Cobbler with an average bitrate of 19.996 Mbps, which isn't especially generous but is adequate for digitally acquired material without major sequences of complex action. No artifacts were in evidence.

The Cobbler Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Cobbler's original 5.1 soundtrack is encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. The mix is filled with understated effects specific to various environments such as Max's shop, Ludlow's various hangouts, the protest outside Mr. Solomon's building and Elaine Greenawalt's suburban home. There isn't any gunplay, but several vehicular mishaps register forcefully. Dialogue is always clear, and the ethnically jaunty score by John Debney (Sin City) and Nick Urata (Crazy, Stupid, Love.) was clearly designed to keep the mood light, even when events get serious.

The Cobbler Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of The Cobbler (1080p; 1.78:1; 15:03): Longer than an EPK but shorter than a full-fledged documentary, this look at the film's creation features interviews with McCarthy, Sandler, Method Man, Buscemi, Diaz, Weaver, producer Mary Jane Skalski and co-writer Paul Sado.



• Trailer (1080p; 1.85:1; 2:21).



• Additional Trailers: At startup the disc plays trailers for The Rewrite, Paradise and Goats, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

The Cobbler Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I wish The Cobbler were better, because Sandler himself gives a convincing performance as Max, and the supporting cast, especially Method Man, is impressive in portraying Max in the various guises he adopts by putting on other people's shoes. It's a cliche to talk about special effects overwhelming the story in today's big-budget films, but The Cobbler may be the first example of a film where a character overwhelms the story, because of the technical challenge of distributing that character among so many cast members. Rent if you're curious.